When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translations that I read as a child - also easily available at the time) along with the stories by the Brothers Grimm.
As one does these days, I asked an LLM to help me detect if I had a bowdlerized version, and while I'm sure the stories were already softened in translation, they're still far more 'rowdy' than stories you can easily find today. In the old folk tales, things just happen. Fairness isn't guaranteed; and sometimes a guy makes a deal and gets eaten anyway; and sometimes someone dies for no reason.
I wonder if the changing narrative structure of modern stories is a result of our improved civilization. In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death and destruction probably feels out of place. Nonetheless, I sometimes am saddened when I read people talk about stories in media and how they 'glorify' bad behaviour or 'send the wrong message'. A thing I really treasure from childhood is the breadth of storytelling: not all stories were an Aesop's fable.
But perhaps that's not true. I suspect the truth is that with lowered barriers to publishing there are just more stories told. The ones from the past that we know are twice selected: once for cultural value, and once because the writer himself was selected. Today, anyone can write, so it's the same problem as we encounter when we look at personal websites today. Sampled randomly in 2004 you would get interesting ones easily. Today, that is not so easy.
This is most easily visible with foreign media. The Chinese stories I've read are alien and strange and interesting; and the Japanese ones take unexpected turns. But they're going through that selection process as well. So it's probably just a boring selection effect.
Still, I've got the old Grimms. I'm keeping that one as an heirloom.
I had a partner who was a teacher in very rough areas; the school principal was routinely called by the local gang leader to let school out early because rival gangs planned to have a shootout in the afternoon. Kids there were abused in more ways than I want to remember or recount, babies were sometimes found in dumpsters, and the whole thing had this constantly oppressive and hopeless atmosphere.
My partner did her best to help the kids in her class, and part of this included reading them stories so they at least got a glimpse of the world outside of what in my opinion was hell on earth. The stories the kids always loved most were the Grimms, the violent ones. I think they allowed them to process and in some weird way make sense of what was happening in the real world around them, if such a thing is possible in that environment. I agree, I think the environment most kids grow up in today necessitates a "sanitizing" of story content in order to make it relevant.
It's important to remember that these stories are orignally an oral tradition that only fairly recently began to be written down. They would have had a myriad of differing versions depending on the preferences of the storyteller, their community and the intended effect on specific audiences.
In a way, retelling these stories in a way that's meaningful to the listeners is the way it always has been. We just have to remember that the darker versions also served a purpose of sense-making, and they can come to serve it again if we need them.
Good on your partner for trying to help those kids.
Isn't that the other way around? People back then had more contact with the darker reality we live in - hence it was more relatable.
Current generation of people in the west have been completely sheltered and protected by the establishment for all their life and have completely forgotten that isn't something natural. With every generation since WW2 this has gotten more pronounced, and at this point people unironically go onto the streets to demonstrate for counties with "less then clandestine governments". They cannot comprehend the reality of living as a powerless victim in a world which will callously destroy them- for no reason whatsoever - because they've been protected from it all their lives.
Or maybe I'm just reading your comment wrong and you meant the same, idk
Yes, you are. Their point is orthogonal to whether people in other times or places typically have/had it worse in terms of agency, fairness, safety, etc. Their point is about the flexibility and natural variation of the original oral medium as opposed to the crystalization of written text.
Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.
I guess I was too unclear with my comment... Because I can see were you're coming from.
Eg. BBCs Black Mirror - which is obnoxiously turning out to be more of a prediction then a cautionary tale - is definitely in the range of "darker content" in the vain I was talking about.
But the target demographic is adults.
The old stories are meant to relate to you. The whole reason they were being told to very very young kids (<6yo) was to make them understand the unfairness of the world in order for them to hopefully be on guard against it when it matters.
They also weren't really fantasy in nature, even if we consider them to be fantasy nowadays. And that's a big part of why a series like stranger things feels inapplicable here - unless I miss remember it's setting.
Wasn't it fundamentally just entertainment? More about spectacle then actually relating to the viewer?
The young adults/teenagers are both 10+ years older then the target demographic of the old tales, and won't relate the story to themselves because it's too disconnected from reality? At least that's my impression.
Think about all the serial killer and urban crime movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the film noir of the postwar period.
TV is more complicated, but cop shows like the early seasons of Law and Order and all of SVU, NYPD, and then later The Wire and The Shield were pretty gritty.
Video games have always been a mix of squeaky clean Mario and Zelda and gory content: Think Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Postal, etc.
If stranger things ended with everyone dead and no happy ending then sure but no, everything is fair and the heroes always win. Horror has always been mainstream fyi, it’s not a recent invention
There's a gallery of variant versions of Cinderella from different countries, even China. In many of them she has an enchanted cow.
http://www.365cinderellas.com/
> The stories the kids always loved most were the Grimms, the violent ones. I think they allowed them to process and in some weird way make sense of what was happening in the real world around them, if such a thing is possible in that environment.
I once read somewhere that after an earthquake, the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety than the children who drew happy happy sunshine butterfly rainbows after the event. Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.
> Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.
Psychologists are sure it is. You should get all your traumatic experience and deal with it. You'd better learn how to remember these things without panic attacks or whatever. And the methods they use is replaying the traumatic memories multiple times while controlling the emotional state. The controlled emotional state sticks to the memories and replaces the one that was remembered before.
Well, that's the theory at least. I tried it and it kinda work but not perfectly, it may require some recurrent sessions over time if the effect fades. Though if you practice it a lot, it becomes a habit, an automatic response to traumatic memories, so any memory replay reduces the strength of the memory.
It is like a positive thinking (you get your negative reaction to the memories and replace it with a positive one... well, maybe just less negative), but it is definitely not burying unprocessed memories deep inside your mind.
> the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety
I believe it is easier for kids, they are more focused on "here and now", and just replaying a memory in a safe environment has much stronger therapeutic effect than for adults. It is easier for adults to ignore the present safety and to dive deep into their past memories with all the associated emotions, so replaying memories can easily make them worse by intensifying remembered emotions.
Adults have crystallized worldviews, which were probably shaped by their traumatic memories, and it shapes their automatic emotional response, and makes matters worse, harder to change. Children are more fluid, they have more plasticity.
If you have a collection of children tales from the Grimm brothers... then this is already watered down.
These brothers traveled in Towns and collected the tales that the adult told to each other, e.g. when spinning wool or whatever boring but necessary winter job they had. They called their first collection "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (children and house tales). The children aimed ones where ... more or less ... okay. Being on the cruel site, of course. But the ones not aimed children could be quite explicit or sexy-hexy --- at least for the times. Small kids probably didn't get most things.
The german wikipedia e.g. writes "Die Texte wurden von Auflage zu Auflage weiter überarbeitet, teilweise „verniedlicht“ und mit christlicher Moral unterfüttert. " which I translate as: the texts were edited from edition to edition, belittled/diminished and bolstered with christian morality" --- the latter probably because most of the editorial work happened in Kassel, which at the time was hugenotic evangelical.
Since the Grimms played a remarkable role in the german language, there is LOTS of academic literate on then, their german words dictionary, their tales collection. So you dive as deep into it as you want.
I guess, there's another set of tranformations in stories.
At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex, nor kisses -- not because of "romantic" self-denial, as we would think -- but just because they were praying. They were busy saving their souls before the judgement day. In the Enlightment age, people stopped understanding this, and replaced it with purely romantic motivation.
The other stories, that villagers told their kids, were probably to scare them, about the dangerous world around. The characters were motivated purely by the need to survive, and minding their own business, no high moral goal. In XIX century, with steam locomotives and boats, people could travel to unthinkable places, and many moved to cities, so you couldn't scare kids with a witch or a werewolf living in that forest beyond that lastmost house. So, storytellers invented the adventure genre. So, instead of trying to survive, characters go far away on purpose, where they need to fight to survive. Or there are some unknown human villains, who the good character has to fight.
In late XX century, this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable, so stories start breaking this pattern, often demonstratively: here's a monster, ugly and huge, the little boy is scared of him, but suddenly the monster turns out nice, and loves dancing walzer or makes sweet pancakes, and they become friends. Soviet cartoons in the 80s were 100% postmodernist, whilst what I saw of the American ones, were still like 80% modernist -- the bad guys, danger, the righteous main character.
>. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god.
Uhm, 50/50. Bear in mind Don Quixote made fun on the old farts from the Middle Ages saving "damisels" in distress. Sancho Panza was the simple, new man but far more grounded than Alonso Quijano which could be depicted as the last living "priest" because since 1492 no one gave a shit about kingdoms, local lords or whatever; everyone wanted to go to The Americas for a quick fortune (either by selling goods, or getting many more times food than in Spain).
>So, storytellers invented the adventure genre.
The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around.
>this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable,
Cosmic fears replaced big, concrete monsters (the rapist from the woods) with abstract fears under Lovecraft.
Nietzche depicted the old pre-Industrial values as obsolete. Lovecraft was scared of the new times. Cervantes just made a good laugh on both the "mythical, glorious times" but also on the "dumb, clueless future man".
In the end both idealistic/realist roles learnt from each other across the adventure, which is what happens IRL in societies.
Cervantes was wiser, the laughted at the old fart seeing dangers everywhere against its outdated values, but so did on the new man with no "elevated" purposes.
> The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around.
Well, maybe. I meant the genre like Jules Verne, Robert Stivenson.
Actually, I checked facts and found out that Daniel Defoe (I thought he lived in the same epoch), in fact lived in XVII-XVIII, much earlier.
Well, Verne was half adventure and half science fiction. You might call them "expedition books" with a purpose, because adventure papyres predate Rome.
The Oddysey, Gilgamesh and basically every tribe in the Earth ever. has its own lore about some hero doing an incredible quest
I think I remember that the original brother grimm stories were also much more violent, and dont forget german classics like the Struwwelpeter, gave me nightmares as a kid - especially the guy with the huge scissors cutting off the thumbs of a kid who sucked on them too much. Its in public domain if anyone is curious: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24571
There's more recent (relatively) stuff as well like Wilhelm Busch's "Max und Moritz", whose fate it is to be ground to a pulp in a mill after blowing the head off their school teacher, killing an old widow's chickens, and other cute children's pranks.
Author Philip Pullman published a version of the Grimm fairy tales in 2012. These stories are intended for a modern audience, but in my opinion, Pullman does a good job of preserving a fair amount of the original scariness and general weirdness. Definitely rougher than the Disney versions of these stories. I recommend this volume to anyone with small children.
When I was a pre-teen I found a book of Indian fairytales in a library. It was a translation, it was thick, the stories were few pages each, easy to read and beautifully illustrated. The content however was terrifying. So much violence, greed, poverty and suffering. The retribution when it was dispensed was as satisfying as it was over-the-top cruel. Eye-gouging was like an entry level option.
It was very long time ago, don't remember any details, but I still shudder remembering it.
> In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death
Two hot-take theories to add onto the pile:
1. In a traveling oral tradition, the teller doesn't want to memorize lots of different versions known in different towns or regions, and they also don't want people to get angry that your version doesn't have some key things from how they remember it. This leads to compromises that don't quite fit together.
2. If you can only store one version, you've got to decide between "fun" versus "faithfully honors the memory of our elders and how they told it", and maybe the latter wins. However with the printing press etc., now there's room to do a bit of both, and the fun version sells better.
> In the old folk tales, things just happen. Fairness isn't guaranteed; and sometimes a guy makes a deal and gets eaten anyway; and sometimes someone dies for no reason.
Do you mean in Indian and Eastern European folk tales? Interesting! I should read more of those (I'm familiar with the usual suspects, but I'm sure I'm missing lots).
If I'm ever magically transported to a classic folk tale like Grimm's, this is my survival guide. Not fool-proof, but good enough:
- Always be kind to strangers, especially old men and women.
- Do not make promises lightly, but when you do, always honor them. Especially if you promised something to an animal that can, bizarrely, speak.
- Do not accept gifts from strangers, and do not follow strange old ladies into their homes.
- Always share what you have with others, e.g. food. If a stranger asks for a favor, always say yes and don't ask for anything in return.
- Do not go into the locked room / open the box they told you not to. You'll live a possibly ignorant but long and happy life.
- Do not mock anyone who looks strange or hideous.
- Always respect your parents and do not lie to them.
- (This is the hardest one) Always be the youngest son / daughter.
You’d love the original sleeping beauty. It’s got rape, infanticide, cannibalism, all of it.
Oh and of course little red riding hood before they got rid of the cannibalism. And the rape.
Oh and of course the Grimm tale - “How some children played at slaughtering”. Murder, suicide, child abandonment - just… good grief. We live in a safe world today.
You mean the versions of Charles Perraults? These are indeed interesting. According to wikipedia, the Grimm brothers did not even use the original sources for "Rotkäppchen" and "Dornröschen" and rather relied on second-hand retellings.
As a side note, there is also a fair share of cannibalism in Grimm's "Schneewittchen" (= "snow white"): the evil queen tells the hunter to kill Schneewittchen and cut out her lungs and liver so that the queen can cook and eat them. The hunter, however, has pity for Schneewittchen and kills a boar instead. The queen proceeds to cook and eat the boar's lungs and liver, thinking it is Schneewittchen's. Only after the meal the magic mirror reveals the truth.
The death of the evil queen is also pretty brutal: at the wedding of Schneewittchen and the prince, the queen is forced to wear shoes filled with glowing coals and dance until she faints and dies.
For some reason, the Disney version decided to omit these parts of the story :-D
The place I come from in eastern Europe has tons of similar dark folk tales for kids. Every single one had something properly dark. Brothers killing each other (or kids their parents, or reverse), canibalism, envy and greed getting the absolutely worst out of people. Since its historically very poor region the hero often prevails, but bad unfair shit happens left and right in between. Grimms were definitely not darker in comparison, in contrary, but their stories had more depth.
When encountering cca modern western kids tales (so not grimm for example), it was shocking how over-sweetened and dumbed down they were, emshittification in Disney style, but everywhere. Shallow naive predictable stories.
It didnt make us bunch of psychos, in contrary ot felt very enriching compared to shalow monotone sanitized storytelling western kids had access to.
Those old stories may have been full of crazy stuff, but look at children's programming over the past 30 years. SpongeBob characters, under the ocean, jumping off a diving board into a pool, again, under the ocean. It isn't violent, but it is crazy.
I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience. It sure seems true of Collodi.
> look at children's programming over the past 30 years. SpongeBob characters, under the ocean, jumping off a diving board into a pool, again, under the ocean. It isn't violent, but it is crazy.
A frog in love with a pig?
> I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience.
I take it Sir is familiar with the British tradition of pantomime? (Where no entendre will be left undoubled).
There’s just no reason to traumatize kids that early. It’s perfectly fine to be a happy Disney kid until 10 and then find the trauma gradually. It’s not like Bridge to Terabithia didn’t exist for the previous generation either.
As a kid, I liked the "traumatic" stuff. The world isn't all sunshine and roses and a lot of the scary elements are there to instill kids with an awareness of danger so they don't become a victim of something horrible. Most of us today live in a world where we don't get eaten by wolves and kidnapped and sold into slavery anymore, but our society is fragile. All it takes is a few bad economic disasters, war, or a famine and things get rough pretty quickly. And right now there are kids enduring those realities.
Roald Dahl would agree with you. Fiction is the perfect place to explore complex emotions around the unsavoury parts of life, in a safe manner where the reader is in control.
Some of these things described as "weirder" really aren't. For example, Pinocchio burning his feet off and getting them replaced by Gepetto - this is a comical example of things implied by the story premise.
We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah!
Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events of this type are to be expected from any competent writer who has taken up the premise. Especially as it is structured as a picaresque fairy tale, it would be weird if this kind of thing didn't happen.
Also - The fairy, originally a corpse - why is a dead revenant of some sort bringing a puppet to life any weirder than a magical fairy? That's not weirder, just different than we've been told.
Wihelm Busch stories are the only ones that I remember really scaring me. They were cruel as hell. Heads cut off with scissors, a nose twisted off, kids thrown into the mill (Max und Moritz, well that was presented in a light-hearted way compared to many others), various limbs removed, cursed to live under water by / with a cruel and ugly (male) mermaid-type thing https://www.zootier-lexikon.org/images/Amphibienprogramm/Leh... , etc...
Children are capable of understanding cruelty, pain, death, suffering, in young age, overprotectiveness is why we have many >20 y/o people who can't speak for themselves and are overly shy.
I'd like numbers/evidence on it too, but for my own generation, I compared my cousins for years precisely about overprotectiveness, and those who were only protected against extreme imminent danger have succeeded in life way further (for their starting conditions, socially and economically) than those who had my aunts all over them not letting them fall and have scrapes.
Anecdotally, again, the parents of those who did NOT fall on dirt were much more wealthy, so these cousins of course inherited (so to speak, their parents aren't dead) the wealth and status, but gosh, they do everything they are told to do, what to study, etc. While those who did fall frequently when babies these days have generated about half of the wealth the others inherited and they are vocal, really nice professionals and of course awesome people to spend time with.
Girls were more protected than boys, regardless of everything else.
I'm not disputing that, my gripe is with the part ">20 y/o people can't speak for themselves and are overly shy". Can we really put an entire generation under this flag? Idk... I've met some 20 somethings and they seemed pretty functional to me.
You conveniently left out the the "we have many" part of that sentence you quoted. No one is suggesting it's the entire generation, or that there aren't plenty of 20-somethings who socially very functional.
But there is evidence out there that Gen Z has higher levels of shyness and social anxiety than previous generations. I personally believe overprotectiveness is one causative factor among others, although I'm not sure whether the evidence is there.
My interpretation was many as in "the vast majority", which would qualify for "put an entire generation". Of course you can't have every single person fall under such a category, this is absurd and you are deliberately not giving me the benefit of the doubt just to nitpick.
But in any case, is this even true? That this generation of 20 something, as OP said, "can't speak for themselves and are overly shy"? That's my gripe. I don't think it is, at least not in such an immediately obvious way. Hope it clarifies. If it doesn't I can only wish you a happy life.
On that note, there is a recent live action Pinocchio film [1] that is very faithful to the book and absolutely magical; with Roberto Benigni playing Geppetto no less.
It has some highly entertaining scathing reviews on Amazon of not being family-safe and faithful to "the original" from people who think Pinocchio was invented by Disney and use the animated movie as a reference for their critiques.
As hilarious as it is sad.
Remembering my dad reading us Pinocchio as a kids and visiting Tuscany around that time, too, with my family, this movie is as close to what I can remember imagining it, as it gets.
It's not entirely correct that the government "chose Tuscan" as the language to push. The literary tradition was already rooted into a vulgata that happened to be mostly similar to the languages spoken in the areas between Roma and Firenze - unsurprisingly so, considering they had traditionally been the wealthiest parts of the country for centuries. In this context of broad intellectual agreement on the fundamentals, Alessandro Manzoni then published a few works that explicitly tried to formalize the language, sprinkling northern inflections on top of the traditional core. These works were later used as the model by authorities, who forced them on the national curriculum.
Looks like probably not Claude based on their privacy/terms:
>AI-powered feedback
>Storica uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to provide feedback on your writing. Your written content is sent to OpenAI's API to generate corrections and suggestions. We do not use your writing content to train AI models. Your writing is processed solely to provide you with immediate feedback.
The copy on the main page gives a first clue. "A daily reading club for language learners" available on 7 languages, on a .club domain...
Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to language learners, without anyone noticing?
I'm not going to argue about the writing style because we know it is an arms race. But look at the underlying business, that business would not exist without AI generated content.
Many (human) translators use DeepL (https://www.deepl.com) in their daily jobs. It employs deep learning (hence the name), but not necessarily LLMs. And it's way better than Google Translate for many languages.
So this offers an alternative, legitimate, route to exactly the website content you're suspicious of.
Lies of P is a fantastic video game (soulslike) that felt to me like a dark take on the Pinocchio story at first, but now maybe seems more in line with the original material. A lot of the references carry through.
The game's way darker still but it doesn't feel overdone. You can tell a lot of soul was poured into it. Nice to know that it all somehow traces back to its source
I remember hearing about "Pinnocchio soulslike" and just couldn't imagine how that'd work. Now it's one of my favourites - especially with the expansion.
I personally could not stomach the clocktower. I may just be bad at platforming, but the stage felt jarringly frustrating compared to the pleasant frustration I was having with the rest of the games challenges. After my 10th or so time getting blasted by a fireball while inching across a beam, I made my peace. It is a shame because I very much enjoyed the premise and world otherwise.
It would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children.
Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries.
In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities.
They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families.
In 20th century, instead, they have been constantly exposed to either real life violence and harshness (like war) or fiction brutality from movies, cartoons and video games.
Nope, Pinocchio is not that weird. It is when compared to an idyllic and peaceful world that has never existed but in our wishful thinking minds.
The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature.
But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.
If this is the case you may wish to click on "edit" and correct Wikipedia:
> "The Adventures of Pinocchio. Story of a Puppet"), commonly shortened to Pinocchio, is an 1883 children's fantasy novel by Italian author Carlo Collodi. It is about the mischievous adventures of an animated marionette named Pinocchio. He faces many perils and temptations, meets characters who teach him about life, and learns goodness before he achieves his heart's desire to become a real boy.
> The story was originally published in serial form as The Story of a Puppet (Italian: La storia di un burattino) in the Giornale per i bambini between 7 July 1881 and 25 January 1883, and was subsequently issued in book form in February 1883, with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti. Since then, Pinocchio has been one of the most popular children's books and has been critically acclaimed.[1]
> Giornale per i bambini (Italian for 'Newspaper for children') was an Italian weekly periodical published in the 1880s by Tipografia dei Fratelli Bencini and later Tipografia Bodoniana.[1] It first appeared as an insert in Fanfulla della domenica in 1881,[2] and established as an independent publication later that year by Ferdinando Martini, who was also the periodical's first editor. The target audience was children between the ages of 6 and 12.[3]
I dont think you are correct. In many parts of Europe, dark folk tales told kids from early age were the norm till very recently. I read and heard such, and they were brutal.
Did they prepare me better for life? Nobody can answer that without time machine. For certain they didnt instill any trauma, you need real world for that and not fantasy. Dont treat kids like some fragile porcelaine dumb beings, they grok most of real world fast, see all the bad parts and can handle it way better than overprotective parents like to admit. They often cant express their thinking effectively but they see, hear and understand most of the adult world well.
Don't be so naive. My parents in Spain are now 70's and lived through rough times in villages in the postwar/dictatorship Spain. Even under the National-Catholic regime these stories were published with the raw violence untouched for kids. You know, better if they were scared than misbehaving around and being shooted down from a farmer, eated alive from feral beasts in the mountains or something worse.
And I've read gorier stories from damn Catholic journals for late aged kids in the 50's -from my parents, as they had tons of distinct books- will full depiction of beheadings from God's will in Africal trives and whatnot that would set a straight +18 sign in the cover today.
I was born in the second half of the 20th century, I read Pinocchio as a child and the Grimm brothers and more. Those were the books for children. Did they damage us compared to kids of 50 years later? I can't tell. Probably nobody can tell until at least next century.
I don't know which version you read of course, but worth noting they've been increasingly diluted over the years, in much the same way as OP says Disney did to Pinocchio.
Spain until the late 60's (because the dictatorship put Spain cultural and economically behind the rest of Europe. My rural parents began to help parents in their village even at age 4 doing small tasks.
No wonder the age on consent in Spain until a decade and a half ago was as low as 14... because it was a unchanged byproduct from the 70's/ society, where by age 14 the 99% of the population couldn't affort anything but basic education (which lasted into that age) and for sure by 14 you woud already be working in a trade as an apprentice as every other adult. And, OFC, you would have aches in your back because of farming with your parents (and women helped at home too).
So a 14 year old in the 1960 could one-hit KO a current 18yo kid from today in the spot because they had drastic hormonal and physical changes due to the hard work. OFC when they hit 30 they almost looked like 50 yo's from today.
I always laugh at some old soccer trading cards from the 80's where tons of players being at 19 look like men in their 40's. Yes, tons of them smoked like chimeneys and drank like pirates.
I re-read Pinocchio with my (bilingual) kids a couple years ago, and I think this article is spot on for some things: it is a bit more weird then I remembered, the Italian reads almost contemporary (except for a few turn of phrases and odd terms), and it has a strong pacing.
Also, definitely likely you will remember some abridged version or Disneys'.
I'm not convinced of the argument that it's making fun of contemporary children books: Pinocchio regularly misbehaves and gets punished for it, which seems pretty much in line with contemporary books.
The children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone?
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl (even), that is super strong, independent and generally self sufficient. It gave kids their own agency which resonated with kids and I guess the time was right that parents did not forbid reading it.
An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.
"(the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering)"
I think you should reread some collection of these that isn't disneyfied. They're great, but probably not what you want to read to a prepubescent kid because that'll start all sorts of conversations you'd rather not have them bring up at school and elsewhere.
The framing is that a king goes to hunt but has to turn back to get something and sees the queen and other women of the court have an orgy with his black slaves, so he murders them all and gets sad. So he goes away with his brother who is also a king to get over this betrayal and finds a threatening demon spirit, who has a human female companion who sings the spirit to sleep and then talks to the kings and tells them that she's taken captive. But, she survives by being unfaithful and fucking random dudes they come across and collect trinkets to remember these partners by. Then she fucks the kings and they return home.
One of the kings then starts fucking a virgin every night and kill her by the morning, until Sheherazade is chosen, who instructs her sister to intervene after the sex, rape in contemporary parlance, and ask her to tell a story. The king agrees to hear a story, and by having an unfinished or another story to tell when morning comes is how Sheherazade keeps the king from killing her.
To late or postmodern sensibilities there are a lot of things to take issue with in these stories, like the casual rape, or insults that are derogatory towards jews and blacks, like calling someone as stupid as the stairs to a synagogue.
Still, they're fantastic and hilarious, and have a lot of interesting information about life in Asia and Africa during ancient and medieval times. They also invite careful thought and deliberation. At least one swedish translation is quite suitable for reading aloud with a partner, something my wife and I had a lot of fun doing way back when we didn't yet have kids.
As for Pippi, she messes with cops and orphanages and refuses to go to school, so it's easy to see why some uptight jurisdictions would censor it. Personally I consider The Brothers Lionheart to be a better story, but its ethics are less obvious and it also starts off with a kid dying violently and another from disease so it's not immediately comedic in the way Pippi is.
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?
On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.
One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.
After reading your first paragraph, I was already drafting a slightly standoffish response in my head, to the effect that the children who grew up on our sanitised fairy tales seem to be blowing each other's heads off on the battlefields of 2026 with undiminished enthusiasm and sadism, and the only difference is that now more of them need a Xanax prescription afterwards. I appreciate that you actually addressed this view with less snark than I was able to.
There are cultural differences here though. Brüder Grimm aren’t quite as toned down in Germany as we see in US stories being Disney-fied.
The U.S. was born out of Puritanism. That prudishness and absolutism continues to echo through into its modern culture. Most people don’t even realize it does.
That reminds me: apparently, the Puritans have actually managed to ban the celebration of Christmas and other church feasts in the Britain during the English Interregnum (An Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, June 1647):
Forasmuch as the Feasts of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, and other
Festivals commonly called Holy-Dayes, have been heretofore superstitiously used and
observed Be it Ordained, by the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, That the
said Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Easter and Whitsuntide, and all other Festival
dayes, commonly called Holy-dayes, be no longer observed as Festivals or Holy-dayes
within this Kingdome of England and Dominion of Wales, any Law, Statute, Custome,
Constitution, or Cannon to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding
Not just a war on Christmas, but an actual war too: this led to a whole bunch of Christmas riots throughout England, including Canterbury's famous "Plum pudding Riots", where rioters ended up sacking the mayor's house and taking over control of the city for weeks. The whole of Kent ended up revolting after the rioters' trial, essentially starting the Second English Civil War.
It's funny, because I think that to certain other cultures, for example the Japanese, Christianity (and other Abrahamic religions) are Lovecraftian horror. Shinto isn't really a religion in the sense you or I know it, it's more of an animistic set of practices related to daily life. The kami are very much real to the Shintoist mind; the big ones, like Amaterasu, don't have much of a direct interest in your life, and the little ones are more like neighbors. You have to pay them their due respect, and they could grant you boons if you made them the right offerings. OK, now tell this person that there is only one all-powerful god who lives in the sky, that he is keeping meticulous track of everything you do, and that he will doom you to eternal torment if you do not meet his threshold for good behavior, or even fail to properly believe in him. (Japanese have a concept of hell, borrowed from Buddhism, but it's much more a place of repaying karmic debt than of eternal suffering. Japanese hell is time-boxed.)
To me there is a reason why when Japanese media invokes Judeo-Christian themes, it's with a sense of grandiosity and terror. Think all of Evangelion. Or how in a JRPG, any time there's a "pope" character, he's the bad guy (or at least the penultimate boss just before God himself).
Children were entering the workforce between 7 and 9 years old; in 2000 kids were entering the workforce between 14 and 18 (a lot of my friends bagged grocceries after work) in 2026 I think the average person enters the work force after 18 now, working in high school is much less common than it was 25 years ago.
TL;DR heavily moralistic stories are probably more relevant in a society where you're commuting to a factory at 9 or 12, vs modern society where your education continues into the mid 20s for many and the 5 or 6 year degree being more common than 4 these days.
I’ve never seen the Disney film. As a child I hated that story. My own children have no love for it either. If I was to guess, I’d say that there isn’t much of a character in that story to get behind and to empathize with as a child. Pinocchio is a selfish little shit. I can’t like him. As an adult I feel for his father’s desperation but even then I could never understand the story’s popularity appeal.
He's is selfish. Also cruel but funny, very gullible, often impulslive... alive.
He was ported to Russian too but they called him Burattino (Italian for 'puppet').
The image of burratino goes back hundreds of years before the story was ever written. He was one of the Zanni characters alongside other lower-class mischevious, comedic 'naughty' (anti-authority) characters like Harlequin.
As a Romanian child, I saw both Pinocchio and Burattino plays, but somehow never made the connection! This is quite interesting. Burattino was akin to a comedy to me, Pinocchio was like a drama.
I love exactly what you hate about it. I would not read it to a small child, but I would dearly recommend it to a 10- to 15-year-old. I reread it as an adult and loved it.
Pinocchio is mean, undisciplined, hedonistic, disrespectful, naive, and, of course, a liar. As soon as he is created, he runs away and behaves selfishly and impulsively.
Then he pays for each flaw with scars. The story shows him learning these lessons on his own wooden skin.
It is a moral story in the deepest sense. It shows what feels to me almost like "forbidden" knowledge. There is no magical thinking in it; it is not trying to preach "Doing bad things is bad, full stop". Instead, the author shows realistic consequences and the full messiness of being in the world. It shows exactly how naivety can result in exploitation (the Fox and the Cat stealing from him after promising him easy riches), laziness in humiliation (skipping school and ending up forced to perform for strangers; he loses his agency and is released only by Mangiafuoco's arbitrary mercy), vanity in manipulation (he is steered by praise, attention, and promises of fame), dishonesty in isolation (his lies literally disfiguring him in front of others, making him ridiculous and impossible to hide), and hedonism in literal dehumanization (Pleasure Island turning boys into donkeys).
It is quite rare for a children's book to be so honest about all the vile things in the world, and to show so directly that these things exist and that their consequences are not clean or neat either.
It also shows how we learn as humans. We do not start out good or bad and stay that way; we are not born "finished". We start as little monsters, full of impulses and feelings we cannot control or do not yet know how to interpret. Yet we learn by acting on them and seeing where they lead us. We are messy creatures, and Pinocchio makes it visible. I believe reading it made me a more robust person with a more sophisticated view of the world.
The whole website appears to be AI generated, including the core value proposition: books rewritten at the user's reading level (for language learning).
The article mentions that 'most' translations soften the book. It looks like the recent Penguin edition attempts to present the original tone in English and there are several much more contemporary translations from the late 19th century which apparently don't attempt to pull back. I'm tempted to give it a shot, maybe see if the kids can handle it.
An easy method these days is to get any frontier AI model to translate it for you.
I've stopped relying on third-party translations because it's common for people to editorialise or miss subtleties, especially in social media... but even professional journalists.
To be fair to GP, while I agree that literary translations are still much better left to professional translators, the specific examples actually given have recently been moving in the opposite direction in my experience - at least for translations from English. In my own language, I've seen articles published in translation under license, on major local news sites, including mis-translations as ridiculous as "1000 lb bombs" translated as "1000 £ bombs" ("bombe de 1000 de lire").
News sites are extremely cash strapped, I bet it's all automatic translation, maybe with the exception of a few important articles, and it has been even before LLMs.
On my local news sites I still see crap like english word order but Romanian words on filler articles, which means it wasn't even a LLM.
During the Ukraine war I saw many Russian or Ukrainian language articles or whatever translated with just Google Translate and it was a hopeless jumble of errors.
Even GPT 4 was massively better.
Some people just don’t understand how general purpose these chat bots are and insist on continuing to use single purpose tools that have been left in the dust.
If you want a verbatim translation of a piece of foreign language text where your problem is specifically that human authors are editorialising their translations… then yes, AI is the solution.
“You always want to use the backhoe!”, says the person with a giant hole they need excavated quickly and cheaply.
Like many other children’s books whxih stood the test of time, those we assume are written for children are more a cautionary tales for adults that children also tend to like as they (still) are lacking understanding of notions such as humility, compassion and all the abstract stuff we now know forms after age 10-12.
The good Tom and Jerry episodes are completely devoid of tact and care, yet marvellous as entertainment .
Russian/Soviet version of Pinocchio called “Buratino” is much nicer. Pinocchio is very individualistic and moralising, everything is a moral lesson or a bible reference. Buratino is very light and kind, main hero learns valuable lessons and defeats main bad guy with his friends, frees them from slavery and they end up getting their own theatre.
the bit about the simple language is interesting, since one of my strongest memories of reading the english translation of the book as a kid is that I learnt two new words from it, "alabaster" and "temple" (as in the side of the head).
As I have aged out of childhood into and through adulthood, I have discovered that MANY of my beloved childhood stories are ... "weirder" than I remember.
It's so creepy that my kids didn't want to hear it (being read to them) with all the burning and stuff. However they also didn't want to listen to the classic fairy tales by Grimm and Andersen which are super creepy as well. Just think of burning witches or some Anderson fairy tale I remember where one guy is put into a bag and thrown into the river. It's not that I deliberately wanted to read the most creepy stories to them but there's a creepy undertone to even the most famous and "harmless" ones, think of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and so on.
Interesting read, wouldn't have thought this of Pinocchio. Sadly, when I was learning Italian, I was reading more sophisticated things like Il Fu Mattia Pascal, with quite superficial understanding.
If you want a film version that is more faithful to the original book, I suggest you watch the 2019 Garrone movie [0]. There's Benigni in It, but this time he plays Geppetto and he's not as insufferable as he can be. And the rest of the cast is very good too (many beloved comedians including the late Gigi Proietti).
I have no idea if this stayed only in Italy or if it has been translated to other languages.
> Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair
He may have run out of ideas and tried to fill in a story with a dark mood in mind (speculation). The thing is that this is not that uncommon in many fantasy novels. Anyone remembers "The Color of Her Panties" by Piers Anthony? I read it, it is very cheesy (also silly, in particular when you as target audience are, say, 10 years old or something like that) but not necessarily mega-creepy either. But then you also begin to wonder ... is it just "good fun" to pick such a title? But then it is not the only instance and you begin to find more oddities. Naturally this depends on the author; some authors never run into such issues, others run into such issues.
I only saw the Pinocchio cartoon, that anime-style animation, on TV. That version was harmless from what I remember. Never read the books, but I am not so surprised about books being darker. Anyone knows the Grimm brothers? They lived from 1785–1863 and 1786–1859 respectively. I clearly remember that some of those drawings were really dark. It's a bit like dark horror stories if you look at it today - here is a summary:
It starts with "There are some fairy tales that are just not meant for kids.".
Some of the pictures by Grimm or illustrators are quite scary, such as the
bleeding or weeping out of eyes ... is gross. Possibly these were more for adults, or adults who did not care, such as Pinocchio - perhaps. A puppet that has a growing body part ... that in itself is already super-weird. Are we certain the nose was meant? Is Pinocchio ... a prison item???
As one does these days, I asked an LLM to help me detect if I had a bowdlerized version, and while I'm sure the stories were already softened in translation, they're still far more 'rowdy' than stories you can easily find today. In the old folk tales, things just happen. Fairness isn't guaranteed; and sometimes a guy makes a deal and gets eaten anyway; and sometimes someone dies for no reason.
I wonder if the changing narrative structure of modern stories is a result of our improved civilization. In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death and destruction probably feels out of place. Nonetheless, I sometimes am saddened when I read people talk about stories in media and how they 'glorify' bad behaviour or 'send the wrong message'. A thing I really treasure from childhood is the breadth of storytelling: not all stories were an Aesop's fable.
But perhaps that's not true. I suspect the truth is that with lowered barriers to publishing there are just more stories told. The ones from the past that we know are twice selected: once for cultural value, and once because the writer himself was selected. Today, anyone can write, so it's the same problem as we encounter when we look at personal websites today. Sampled randomly in 2004 you would get interesting ones easily. Today, that is not so easy.
This is most easily visible with foreign media. The Chinese stories I've read are alien and strange and interesting; and the Japanese ones take unexpected turns. But they're going through that selection process as well. So it's probably just a boring selection effect.
Still, I've got the old Grimms. I'm keeping that one as an heirloom.
My partner did her best to help the kids in her class, and part of this included reading them stories so they at least got a glimpse of the world outside of what in my opinion was hell on earth. The stories the kids always loved most were the Grimms, the violent ones. I think they allowed them to process and in some weird way make sense of what was happening in the real world around them, if such a thing is possible in that environment. I agree, I think the environment most kids grow up in today necessitates a "sanitizing" of story content in order to make it relevant.
In a way, retelling these stories in a way that's meaningful to the listeners is the way it always has been. We just have to remember that the darker versions also served a purpose of sense-making, and they can come to serve it again if we need them.
Good on your partner for trying to help those kids.
Current generation of people in the west have been completely sheltered and protected by the establishment for all their life and have completely forgotten that isn't something natural. With every generation since WW2 this has gotten more pronounced, and at this point people unironically go onto the streets to demonstrate for counties with "less then clandestine governments". They cannot comprehend the reality of living as a powerless victim in a world which will callously destroy them- for no reason whatsoever - because they've been protected from it all their lives.
Or maybe I'm just reading your comment wrong and you meant the same, idk
Yes, you are. Their point is orthogonal to whether people in other times or places typically have/had it worse in terms of agency, fairness, safety, etc. Their point is about the flexibility and natural variation of the original oral medium as opposed to the crystalization of written text.
Eg. BBCs Black Mirror - which is obnoxiously turning out to be more of a prediction then a cautionary tale - is definitely in the range of "darker content" in the vain I was talking about. But the target demographic is adults.
The old stories are meant to relate to you. The whole reason they were being told to very very young kids (<6yo) was to make them understand the unfairness of the world in order for them to hopefully be on guard against it when it matters.
They also weren't really fantasy in nature, even if we consider them to be fantasy nowadays. And that's a big part of why a series like stranger things feels inapplicable here - unless I miss remember it's setting. Wasn't it fundamentally just entertainment? More about spectacle then actually relating to the viewer?
The young adults/teenagers are both 10+ years older then the target demographic of the old tales, and won't relate the story to themselves because it's too disconnected from reality? At least that's my impression.
Think about all the serial killer and urban crime movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the film noir of the postwar period.
TV is more complicated, but cop shows like the early seasons of Law and Order and all of SVU, NYPD, and then later The Wire and The Shield were pretty gritty.
Video games have always been a mix of squeaky clean Mario and Zelda and gory content: Think Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Postal, etc.
I once read somewhere that after an earthquake, the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety than the children who drew happy happy sunshine butterfly rainbows after the event. Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.
Psychologists are sure it is. You should get all your traumatic experience and deal with it. You'd better learn how to remember these things without panic attacks or whatever. And the methods they use is replaying the traumatic memories multiple times while controlling the emotional state. The controlled emotional state sticks to the memories and replaces the one that was remembered before.
Well, that's the theory at least. I tried it and it kinda work but not perfectly, it may require some recurrent sessions over time if the effect fades. Though if you practice it a lot, it becomes a habit, an automatic response to traumatic memories, so any memory replay reduces the strength of the memory.
It is like a positive thinking (you get your negative reaction to the memories and replace it with a positive one... well, maybe just less negative), but it is definitely not burying unprocessed memories deep inside your mind.
> the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety
I believe it is easier for kids, they are more focused on "here and now", and just replaying a memory in a safe environment has much stronger therapeutic effect than for adults. It is easier for adults to ignore the present safety and to dive deep into their past memories with all the associated emotions, so replaying memories can easily make them worse by intensifying remembered emotions.
Adults have crystallized worldviews, which were probably shaped by their traumatic memories, and it shapes their automatic emotional response, and makes matters worse, harder to change. Children are more fluid, they have more plasticity.
These brothers traveled in Towns and collected the tales that the adult told to each other, e.g. when spinning wool or whatever boring but necessary winter job they had. They called their first collection "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (children and house tales). The children aimed ones where ... more or less ... okay. Being on the cruel site, of course. But the ones not aimed children could be quite explicit or sexy-hexy --- at least for the times. Small kids probably didn't get most things.
The german wikipedia e.g. writes "Die Texte wurden von Auflage zu Auflage weiter überarbeitet, teilweise „verniedlicht“ und mit christlicher Moral unterfüttert. " which I translate as: the texts were edited from edition to edition, belittled/diminished and bolstered with christian morality" --- the latter probably because most of the editorial work happened in Kassel, which at the time was hugenotic evangelical.
Since the Grimms played a remarkable role in the german language, there is LOTS of academic literate on then, their german words dictionary, their tales collection. So you dive as deep into it as you want.
At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex, nor kisses -- not because of "romantic" self-denial, as we would think -- but just because they were praying. They were busy saving their souls before the judgement day. In the Enlightment age, people stopped understanding this, and replaced it with purely romantic motivation.
The other stories, that villagers told their kids, were probably to scare them, about the dangerous world around. The characters were motivated purely by the need to survive, and minding their own business, no high moral goal. In XIX century, with steam locomotives and boats, people could travel to unthinkable places, and many moved to cities, so you couldn't scare kids with a witch or a werewolf living in that forest beyond that lastmost house. So, storytellers invented the adventure genre. So, instead of trying to survive, characters go far away on purpose, where they need to fight to survive. Or there are some unknown human villains, who the good character has to fight.
In late XX century, this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable, so stories start breaking this pattern, often demonstratively: here's a monster, ugly and huge, the little boy is scared of him, but suddenly the monster turns out nice, and loves dancing walzer or makes sweet pancakes, and they become friends. Soviet cartoons in the 80s were 100% postmodernist, whilst what I saw of the American ones, were still like 80% modernist -- the bad guys, danger, the righteous main character.
Uhm, 50/50. Bear in mind Don Quixote made fun on the old farts from the Middle Ages saving "damisels" in distress. Sancho Panza was the simple, new man but far more grounded than Alonso Quijano which could be depicted as the last living "priest" because since 1492 no one gave a shit about kingdoms, local lords or whatever; everyone wanted to go to The Americas for a quick fortune (either by selling goods, or getting many more times food than in Spain).
>So, storytellers invented the adventure genre.
The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around.
>this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable,
Cosmic fears replaced big, concrete monsters (the rapist from the woods) with abstract fears under Lovecraft.
Nietzche depicted the old pre-Industrial values as obsolete. Lovecraft was scared of the new times. Cervantes just made a good laugh on both the "mythical, glorious times" but also on the "dumb, clueless future man". In the end both idealistic/realist roles learnt from each other across the adventure, which is what happens IRL in societies.
Cervantes was wiser, the laughted at the old fart seeing dangers everywhere against its outdated values, but so did on the new man with no "elevated" purposes.
Well, maybe. I meant the genre like Jules Verne, Robert Stivenson.
Actually, I checked facts and found out that Daniel Defoe (I thought he lived in the same epoch), in fact lived in XVII-XVIII, much earlier.
The Oddysey, Gilgamesh and basically every tribe in the Earth ever. has its own lore about some hero doing an incredible quest
When I was a pre-teen I found a book of Indian fairytales in a library. It was a translation, it was thick, the stories were few pages each, easy to read and beautifully illustrated. The content however was terrifying. So much violence, greed, poverty and suffering. The retribution when it was dispensed was as satisfying as it was over-the-top cruel. Eye-gouging was like an entry level option.
It was very long time ago, don't remember any details, but I still shudder remembering it.
Two hot-take theories to add onto the pile:
1. In a traveling oral tradition, the teller doesn't want to memorize lots of different versions known in different towns or regions, and they also don't want people to get angry that your version doesn't have some key things from how they remember it. This leads to compromises that don't quite fit together.
2. If you can only store one version, you've got to decide between "fun" versus "faithfully honors the memory of our elders and how they told it", and maybe the latter wins. However with the printing press etc., now there's room to do a bit of both, and the fun version sells better.
Do you mean in Indian and Eastern European folk tales? Interesting! I should read more of those (I'm familiar with the usual suspects, but I'm sure I'm missing lots).
If I'm ever magically transported to a classic folk tale like Grimm's, this is my survival guide. Not fool-proof, but good enough:
- Always be kind to strangers, especially old men and women.
- Do not make promises lightly, but when you do, always honor them. Especially if you promised something to an animal that can, bizarrely, speak.
- Do not accept gifts from strangers, and do not follow strange old ladies into their homes.
- Always share what you have with others, e.g. food. If a stranger asks for a favor, always say yes and don't ask for anything in return.
- Do not go into the locked room / open the box they told you not to. You'll live a possibly ignorant but long and happy life.
- Do not mock anyone who looks strange or hideous.
- Always respect your parents and do not lie to them.
- (This is the hardest one) Always be the youngest son / daughter.
Oh and of course little red riding hood before they got rid of the cannibalism. And the rape.
Oh and of course the Grimm tale - “How some children played at slaughtering”. Murder, suicide, child abandonment - just… good grief. We live in a safe world today.
As a side note, there is also a fair share of cannibalism in Grimm's "Schneewittchen" (= "snow white"): the evil queen tells the hunter to kill Schneewittchen and cut out her lungs and liver so that the queen can cook and eat them. The hunter, however, has pity for Schneewittchen and kills a boar instead. The queen proceeds to cook and eat the boar's lungs and liver, thinking it is Schneewittchen's. Only after the meal the magic mirror reveals the truth.
The death of the evil queen is also pretty brutal: at the wedding of Schneewittchen and the prince, the queen is forced to wear shoes filled with glowing coals and dance until she faints and dies.
For some reason, the Disney version decided to omit these parts of the story :-D
When encountering cca modern western kids tales (so not grimm for example), it was shocking how over-sweetened and dumbed down they were, emshittification in Disney style, but everywhere. Shallow naive predictable stories.
It didnt make us bunch of psychos, in contrary ot felt very enriching compared to shalow monotone sanitized storytelling western kids had access to.
I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience. It sure seems true of Collodi.
A frog in love with a pig?
> I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience.
I take it Sir is familiar with the British tradition of pantomime? (Where no entendre will be left undoubled).
My wtf cartoon through adult eyes is Ren and Stimpy. Serious moments of not even trying to be for kids.
To me those seem like made up numbers.
We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah!
Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events of this type are to be expected from any competent writer who has taken up the premise. Especially as it is structured as a picaresque fairy tale, it would be weird if this kind of thing didn't happen.
Also - The fairy, originally a corpse - why is a dead revenant of some sort bringing a puppet to life any weirder than a magical fairy? That's not weirder, just different than we've been told.
Children are capable of understanding cruelty, pain, death, suffering, in young age, overprotectiveness is why we have many >20 y/o people who can't speak for themselves and are overly shy.
Is this even true or is it just your personal impression?
Anecdotally, again, the parents of those who did NOT fall on dirt were much more wealthy, so these cousins of course inherited (so to speak, their parents aren't dead) the wealth and status, but gosh, they do everything they are told to do, what to study, etc. While those who did fall frequently when babies these days have generated about half of the wealth the others inherited and they are vocal, really nice professionals and of course awesome people to spend time with.
Girls were more protected than boys, regardless of everything else.
But there is evidence out there that Gen Z has higher levels of shyness and social anxiety than previous generations. I personally believe overprotectiveness is one causative factor among others, although I'm not sure whether the evidence is there.
But in any case, is this even true? That this generation of 20 something, as OP said, "can't speak for themselves and are overly shy"? That's my gripe. I don't think it is, at least not in such an immediately obvious way. Hope it clarifies. If it doesn't I can only wish you a happy life.
It has some highly entertaining scathing reviews on Amazon of not being family-safe and faithful to "the original" from people who think Pinocchio was invented by Disney and use the animated movie as a reference for their critiques.
As hilarious as it is sad.
Remembering my dad reading us Pinocchio as a kids and visiting Tuscany around that time, too, with my family, this movie is as close to what I can remember imagining it, as it gets.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rIcXgMx7hU
This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".
Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.
>AI-powered feedback
>Storica uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to provide feedback on your writing. Your written content is sent to OpenAI's API to generate corrections and suggestions. We do not use your writing content to train AI models. Your writing is processed solely to provide you with immediate feedback.
It does look LLM-generated though.
Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to language learners, without anyone noticing?
I'm not going to argue about the writing style because we know it is an arms race. But look at the underlying business, that business would not exist without AI generated content.
So this offers an alternative, legitimate, route to exactly the website content you're suspicious of.
> The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.
Or this also reads very LLM like to me:
> None of the cruelty is gratuitous, exactly. It is dramatised exhaustion with the genre.
I remember hearing about "Pinnocchio soulslike" and just couldn't imagine how that'd work. Now it's one of my favourites - especially with the expansion.
And yeah, you’re right it’s wayyy darker ha.
In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families.
In 20th century, instead, they have been constantly exposed to either real life violence and harshness (like war) or fiction brutality from movies, cartoons and video games.
Nope, Pinocchio is not that weird. It is when compared to an idyllic and peaceful world that has never existed but in our wishful thinking minds.
But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.
But I'm not a pedagogue, just a dad.
If this is the case you may wish to click on "edit" and correct Wikipedia:
> "The Adventures of Pinocchio. Story of a Puppet"), commonly shortened to Pinocchio, is an 1883 children's fantasy novel by Italian author Carlo Collodi. It is about the mischievous adventures of an animated marionette named Pinocchio. He faces many perils and temptations, meets characters who teach him about life, and learns goodness before he achieves his heart's desire to become a real boy.
> The story was originally published in serial form as The Story of a Puppet (Italian: La storia di un burattino) in the Giornale per i bambini between 7 July 1881 and 25 January 1883, and was subsequently issued in book form in February 1883, with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti. Since then, Pinocchio has been one of the most popular children's books and has been critically acclaimed.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio
> Giornale per i bambini (Italian for 'Newspaper for children') was an Italian weekly periodical published in the 1880s by Tipografia dei Fratelli Bencini and later Tipografia Bodoniana.[1] It first appeared as an insert in Fanfulla della domenica in 1881,[2] and established as an independent publication later that year by Ferdinando Martini, who was also the periodical's first editor. The target audience was children between the ages of 6 and 12.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giornale_per_i_bambini
Did they prepare me better for life? Nobody can answer that without time machine. For certain they didnt instill any trauma, you need real world for that and not fantasy. Dont treat kids like some fragile porcelaine dumb beings, they grok most of real world fast, see all the bad parts and can handle it way better than overprotective parents like to admit. They often cant express their thinking effectively but they see, hear and understand most of the adult world well.
I certainly read those stories too to my kids.
And I've read gorier stories from damn Catholic journals for late aged kids in the 50's -from my parents, as they had tons of distinct books- will full depiction of beheadings from God's will in Africal trives and whatnot that would set a straight +18 sign in the cover today.
So a 14 year old in the 1960 could one-hit KO a current 18yo kid from today in the spot because they had drastic hormonal and physical changes due to the hard work. OFC when they hit 30 they almost looked like 50 yo's from today.
I always laugh at some old soccer trading cards from the 80's where tons of players being at 19 look like men in their 40's. Yes, tons of them smoked like chimeneys and drank like pirates.
Also, definitely likely you will remember some abridged version or Disneys'.
I'm not convinced of the argument that it's making fun of contemporary children books: Pinocchio regularly misbehaves and gets punished for it, which seems pretty much in line with contemporary books.
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.
I think you should reread some collection of these that isn't disneyfied. They're great, but probably not what you want to read to a prepubescent kid because that'll start all sorts of conversations you'd rather not have them bring up at school and elsewhere.
The framing is that a king goes to hunt but has to turn back to get something and sees the queen and other women of the court have an orgy with his black slaves, so he murders them all and gets sad. So he goes away with his brother who is also a king to get over this betrayal and finds a threatening demon spirit, who has a human female companion who sings the spirit to sleep and then talks to the kings and tells them that she's taken captive. But, she survives by being unfaithful and fucking random dudes they come across and collect trinkets to remember these partners by. Then she fucks the kings and they return home.
One of the kings then starts fucking a virgin every night and kill her by the morning, until Sheherazade is chosen, who instructs her sister to intervene after the sex, rape in contemporary parlance, and ask her to tell a story. The king agrees to hear a story, and by having an unfinished or another story to tell when morning comes is how Sheherazade keeps the king from killing her.
To late or postmodern sensibilities there are a lot of things to take issue with in these stories, like the casual rape, or insults that are derogatory towards jews and blacks, like calling someone as stupid as the stairs to a synagogue.
Still, they're fantastic and hilarious, and have a lot of interesting information about life in Asia and Africa during ancient and medieval times. They also invite careful thought and deliberation. At least one swedish translation is quite suitable for reading aloud with a partner, something my wife and I had a lot of fun doing way back when we didn't yet have kids.
As for Pippi, she messes with cops and orphanages and refuses to go to school, so it's easy to see why some uptight jurisdictions would censor it. Personally I consider The Brothers Lionheart to be a better story, but its ethics are less obvious and it also starts off with a kid dying violently and another from disease so it's not immediately comedic in the way Pippi is.
On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?
On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.
One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.
The U.S. was born out of Puritanism. That prudishness and absolutism continues to echo through into its modern culture. Most people don’t even realize it does.
That reminds me: apparently, the Puritans have actually managed to ban the celebration of Christmas and other church feasts in the Britain during the English Interregnum (An Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, June 1647):
Talk about the war on Christmas!Not just a war on Christmas, but an actual war too: this led to a whole bunch of Christmas riots throughout England, including Canterbury's famous "Plum pudding Riots", where rioters ended up sacking the mayor's house and taking over control of the city for weeks. The whole of Kent ended up revolting after the rioters' trial, essentially starting the Second English Civil War.
To me there is a reason why when Japanese media invokes Judeo-Christian themes, it's with a sense of grandiosity and terror. Think all of Evangelion. Or how in a JRPG, any time there's a "pope" character, he's the bad guy (or at least the penultimate boss just before God himself).
Could you elaborate on this?
https://victorianweb.org/genre/autobiography/walther.html
https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/the-invention-of-childhood
https://www.vassar.edu/specialcollections/exhibit-highlights...
TL;DR heavily moralistic stories are probably more relevant in a society where you're commuting to a factory at 9 or 12, vs modern society where your education continues into the mid 20s for many and the 5 or 6 year degree being more common than 4 these days.
Yes. And we gave children Disney and television or Netflix, with only violence, with, when existing, a dumbed down plot.
Pinocchio is a selfish brat and that's a central tenet of his redemption arc.
He was ported to Russian too but they called him Burattino (Italian for 'puppet').
The image of burratino goes back hundreds of years before the story was ever written. He was one of the Zanni characters alongside other lower-class mischevious, comedic 'naughty' (anti-authority) characters like Harlequin.
Pinocchio is mean, undisciplined, hedonistic, disrespectful, naive, and, of course, a liar. As soon as he is created, he runs away and behaves selfishly and impulsively.
Then he pays for each flaw with scars. The story shows him learning these lessons on his own wooden skin.
It is a moral story in the deepest sense. It shows what feels to me almost like "forbidden" knowledge. There is no magical thinking in it; it is not trying to preach "Doing bad things is bad, full stop". Instead, the author shows realistic consequences and the full messiness of being in the world. It shows exactly how naivety can result in exploitation (the Fox and the Cat stealing from him after promising him easy riches), laziness in humiliation (skipping school and ending up forced to perform for strangers; he loses his agency and is released only by Mangiafuoco's arbitrary mercy), vanity in manipulation (he is steered by praise, attention, and promises of fame), dishonesty in isolation (his lies literally disfiguring him in front of others, making him ridiculous and impossible to hide), and hedonism in literal dehumanization (Pleasure Island turning boys into donkeys).
It is quite rare for a children's book to be so honest about all the vile things in the world, and to show so directly that these things exist and that their consequences are not clean or neat either.
It also shows how we learn as humans. We do not start out good or bad and stay that way; we are not born "finished". We start as little monsters, full of impulses and feelings we cannot control or do not yet know how to interpret. Yet we learn by acting on them and seeing where they lead us. We are messy creatures, and Pinocchio makes it visible. I believe reading it made me a more robust person with a more sophisticated view of the world.
The poster should disclose it is AI...
Which Penguin edition is this?
[1]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/31374/pinocchio-by-collodi-c...
I've stopped relying on third-party translations because it's common for people to editorialise or miss subtleties, especially in social media... but even professional journalists.
And the idea of disregarding professional translations in favor of LLMs for quality reasons is breathtakingly...something. Arrogant? Naive?
On my local news sites I still see crap like english word order but Romanian words on filler articles, which means it wasn't even a LLM.
Even GPT 4 was massively better.
Some people just don’t understand how general purpose these chat bots are and insist on continuing to use single purpose tools that have been left in the dust.
“You always want to use the backhoe!”, says the person with a giant hole they need excavated quickly and cheaply.
The good Tom and Jerry episodes are completely devoid of tact and care, yet marvellous as entertainment .
Hm, that gave me an idea... sounds like a fun way to learn Italian if you already have some basic knowledge?
Dogfish in Turkish, “köpekbalığı”, also literally means shark.
[1] https://liberliber.it/autori/autori-c/carlo-collodi-alias-ca...
I have no idea if this stayed only in Italy or if it has been translated to other languages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio_(2019_film)
He may have run out of ideas and tried to fill in a story with a dark mood in mind (speculation). The thing is that this is not that uncommon in many fantasy novels. Anyone remembers "The Color of Her Panties" by Piers Anthony? I read it, it is very cheesy (also silly, in particular when you as target audience are, say, 10 years old or something like that) but not necessarily mega-creepy either. But then you also begin to wonder ... is it just "good fun" to pick such a title? But then it is not the only instance and you begin to find more oddities. Naturally this depends on the author; some authors never run into such issues, others run into such issues.
I only saw the Pinocchio cartoon, that anime-style animation, on TV. That version was harmless from what I remember. Never read the books, but I am not so surprised about books being darker. Anyone knows the Grimm brothers? They lived from 1785–1863 and 1786–1859 respectively. I clearly remember that some of those drawings were really dark. It's a bit like dark horror stories if you look at it today - here is a summary:
https://discover.hubpages.com/literature/Grimms-Fairy-Tales-...
It starts with "There are some fairy tales that are just not meant for kids.".
Some of the pictures by Grimm or illustrators are quite scary, such as the bleeding or weeping out of eyes ... is gross. Possibly these were more for adults, or adults who did not care, such as Pinocchio - perhaps. A puppet that has a growing body part ... that in itself is already super-weird. Are we certain the nose was meant? Is Pinocchio ... a prison item???